Does Corruption make Russia a Neo-Feudal State?

The Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote that hegemony is exercised through the combination of force and consent. Ideally, rule by consent is preferred, though force is always waiting in the wings. Gramsci, however, mentioned a third form of rule, one that is often skipped over because it is buried in a footnote of his classic essay “Notes on Italian History.” That third is rule by corruption and fraud. “Between consent and force,” he wrote, “stands corruption/fraud. This consists in procuring the demoralization and paralysis of the antagonist (or antagonists) by buying its leaders—either covertly, or, in cases of imminent danger, openly—in order to sow disarray and confusion in his ranks.”

It would be beneficial to keep rule through corruption and fraud in mind when thinking about the nature of the Russian state. In many ways, it is not a traditional liberal state with independent branches of government, though it professes itself to be as such. It is also not a state solely based on vertical flows of power. While one may view Putin’s centralization of power as a sign of the state rotating on a singular axis, this view is more a mystification than anything else. To be sure, Putin specifically and Russia in general would like to be perceived as a unipolar state. The ubiquity of photos of Putin personally meeting with officials strives to reproduce a common theme in Russian history: a strong, competent Tsar at the center who subordinates his functionaries for the safety and benefit of the people.

But Putin’s photo ops also engender another interpretation. Putin must personally meet with his functionaries because he can’t trust the state apparatus to run itself. It is and can only be held together through a widespread network of personal connections. Therefore, I would argue that the Russian state is a network state where power is located in concentric circles that are held together by an axis personified by Putin himself. The words “held together” need to be emphasized here. The figure of Putin is not so much for benefit of himself, but more for the benefit of the rulers of the fiefdoms that make up the circles. Putin keeps the peace. He prevents the competing power centers from killing themselves.

This geography of the Russian state has its social manifestation in corruption. Much of this corruption is illegal in that it violates Russian law; some of it is not. However, it is ubiquitous because it is socially legitimized. Corruption gets its legitimacy because the ruling classes rule through personal connections, clans, and networks. As Owen Mathews writes in an article in Newsweek called “The New Feudalism,”

These days, any transaction of value—from getting your kid into university, to arranging visits to doctors, to starting a business—depends upon the whims of the king, his knights in the Kremlin or the legions of vassals who live off their patronage and in turn pay them tribute. From the mightiest oligarch to the lowliest common citizen, every aspect of every Russian’s life—their right to a home, their car or work—increasingly presupposes some form of crooked relationship with the state and its servants.

While I think Owen overstates the issue by implying a straight line from the Kremlin down to its lowliest municipal servant, in a sense he is right. The problem is that corruption in Russia mostly appears benign. There is a saying there, “?????? ?? ????????,” or “forbidden but possible.” Combining two seemingly contradictory worlds captures the essence of corruption. And that corruption is not necessarily located in monetary bribes. There is a recognition in Russia that “?????? ?????,” or “personal connections” open doors, get things done, thereby making the forbidden possible. This doesn’t mean that personal connections are rooted in illegality. It merely functions according to long standing traditions of customary law which in the flow of everyday life trump juridical law.

Being a friend of a friend matters. As a Russian researcher explained to me the other day, “You can’t survive in Russia with just your immediate family. Therefore you have to make your family larger. When a person climbs the economic or social ladder, the rest, the “?????,” has an interest in that person too. Your benefit is also theirs.” Though ???? (pull or influence) is becoming increasingly monetarized, as you go up the class ladder, the connections widen. It is trickle down economics ?? ??????????? (that is person to person)

My own experience in this has been minor though rewarding. I’m too small of a fish to be privy to any real corruption. Since I tend to have good relations with archivists (or know people who do), my orders get filled quicker than others, I am warmly greeted when I arrive, and sometimes I get privileges that others don’t, namely working in the archive when it is closed for others, discounts on photocopying, and other advantages when they stretch the rule.

It also would be wrong to charge that blat is immoral or corrupt. As one observer Alena Ledeneva quotes in her book, Russia’s Economy of Favours:

“You of course will think that . . . the behavior of [the] Homososes [that is Homo Sovieticus—Sean] in such a situation is amoral. But we look at it differently. It is easy to be moral if you live in conditions which do not force you into morally reprehensible actions. You are well fed and clothed; you have a nice house with books and other ways of enjoying yourselves. And it seems to you that to be moral is natural and not in the least bit difficult . . . Everything is simple and clear cut. But if a man finds himself below the bread line, beneath the minimum that is indispensable if morals are to be considered applicable in real life, then it is senseless to apply moral criteria to his behavior. A man in such a position is not only freed ipse facto from normal norms; he is freed from them by these moral concepts themselves. It is immoral to expect a man to be moral if he lacks the minimum living conditions that permit society to demand morality from him . . . Homososes are born, are educated and live in such conditions that it is just ridiculous to accuse them of immorality.”

While this quote was from the Soviet period, I think it still can be applied today in terms of how blat is understood by its practitioners. It does however raise the question that if Russia is structured around a multiplicity of personal networks, does that necessarily make the Russian state feudal as Owen suggests?

Forgetting the fact that Owen doesn’t provide a definition of feudal in his article, to suggest that Russia is also implies that it is a) not modern, and b) states based on the rule of law are devoid of such corruption. The latter is rather easy to dismiss. Most liberal states have a measure of corruption and personal connections that make them work. Liberal blat exists up and down the social food chain in various degrees. More doors open when you know someone than when you don’t. The difference between Russia and liberal states is one of quantity than quality.

Still, at some point quantity becomes quality. The social and cultural importance of connections in Russia suggest that there is a qualitative difference between how things are done there than in liberal societies. This is where the issue of modern comes in. Liberal states became “modern,” the argument goes, by eliminating the importance of personal connections, and by extension corruption by establishing the rule of law. On a cultural level most citizens in liberal states believe, rightly or wrongly, that the law stands above society. In Russia, however, the law is understood by most as merely a tool of the powerful. In this way, many observers place Russia next to “third world” countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia rather than in the modern pantheon of the West.

It seems that the Economist shares this latter point. Citing the Transparency International’s “corruption perceptions index”, it reports that “Russia has fallen to rank alongside Niger, Sierra Leone and Albania. A recent survey by Indem, a Russian think-tank, found an enormous hike, since 2001, in the number and size of bribes given by young men and their families to avoid conscription and, relatedly, in those paid to get into universities. (Fixing a court case, Indem found, has got a bit cheaper.)”

All of this reflects on the nature of the Russia state. From the upper circles of the Russian state to the lowest rungs of society, Russians can only rely on others in their circle for mutual aid. That means that the institutions that the Russian state provide: security, legal recourse, social welfare, education, and more importantly stable rule, gives way to a system that is inherently centralized but at the same time dispersed. The result produces what the historian Alfred Rieber said of Alexander II, a managerial tsar that keeps the warring clans from eating themselves. The “autocrat,” therefore, finds himself not in hegemonic control, but constantly playing a careful game of placating the powerful whose patronage allows him to rule in the first place.

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I promised myself to put commenting on the Litvinenko Affair to bed, but a friend alerted me to this interesting comment by Neil Clark.His words sum up my position on much of the rhetoric and baseless accusations against the Kremlin in regard to Litvinenko’s death.

Clark writes,

From a socialist perspective there are certainly plenty of grounds for criticising the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. He’s introduced a flat-rate income tax, which greatly benefits the wealthy, and plans the partial marketisation of Russia’s education and health systems. And while some of Russia’s notorious oligarchs, who made their fortunes from fleecing public funds in the 1990s under Yeltsin have been bought to justice, others remain free to flaunt their ill-gotten gains, in a country where the gap between rich and poor is chasmic.

Even so, those on the left who have been enthusiastically joining in the current wave of Putin-bashing sweeping the western media, ought to consider whose cause they are serving. For it is beyond doubt that the driving force behind the campaign to portray the Russian President as a sinister totalitarian despot, have been Washington’s neo-conservatives.

Even before the recent unexplained deaths of journalist Anna Politskaya and former secret service man Alexander Litvinenko, hawks in the U.S. were doing all they could to discredit the Russian government. In 2003, Bruce P.Jackson, Director of the ‘Project for a New American Century’ and a key figure in several other neo-con pressure groups, talked of the way Putin’s re-nationalisation of energy companies threatened the West’s ‘democratic objectives- and claimed Putin had established a ‘de facto Cold War administration’. Jackson’s prognosis was simple: a new ‘soft-war’ against the Kremlin, a call echoed by many other leading neo-conservatives. The neo- cons are gunning for Putin not because of concern over alleged anti-democratic practices, but because the current Russian regime stands in the way of their plans for global hegemony. Their imperialistic strategy was recorded in the infamous ‘Wolfowitz memorandum’ a secret Pentagon document, leaked to the New York Times in 1992, which targeted Russia as the biggest future threat to US geo-strategic ambitions. The memorandum, authored by the then under-secretary for defence Paul Wolfowitz, considered by many to be the architect of the Iraq war, projected a U.S.-Russian confrontation over NATO expansion.

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Kommersant’s English mirror site has an article with the details about Basayev’s death and autopsy. His body was so mangled by a weapons explosion that forensic experts had to identify the corpse through his hands and feet. Details of the explosion that killed him have been pieced together by representatives of the Interior Ministry and Ingushetian Prosecutor’s Office. They are as follows:

According to the investigation, late Sunday evening, several automobiles – three cars and two KamAZ trucks, one of which was towing the other – came to an unfinished house on the edge of Ekazhevo. There was some movement inside the house for a while, said the very few witnesses investigators were able to find, as people in black uniforms went back and forth between the house and the forest, which began at the edge of the yard and stretched all the way to the border with North Ossetia. They unloaded crates from the trucks and transferred other between cars. Then a powerful explosion took place.

Local police arrived to find the smoking frame of one of the trucks with a thick cable tied to its front bumper and a large pit, on the other side of which was the rear part of a car frame. The other truck stood at a distance of several tens of meters and was relatively undamaged. In the back of the truck were 150 unguided artillery missiles and about 100 cartridges of various calibers. Several dozen barrels from RPG-7 and RPG-26 grenade launchers were scattered within a radius of half a kilometer, as well as unexploded warheads from them and a large number of bullets. Those were the contents of the truck that exploded. Four bodies and four machineguns were also found.

Early Monday morning, about six hours after the blast, FSB agents arrived on the scene. They dismissed the local police and prosecutors and declared that the event had been their special operation. Several hours later they announced that Basaev has been killed.

The material evidence gathered by experts indicates, however, that the militants most likely blew themselves up due to careless handling of explosives. Newly built empty houses were being used by the separatists as warehouses where large shipments of weapons from abroad were received and distributed. Representatives from various groups were dividing a newly received shipment among themselves on Sunday. It is possible that the weapons were to be carried away in the two trucks but, after one of them broke down, the weapons had to be reloaded into a car.

So there you have it. FSB special forces did not have a hand in killing him, though I’m sure they will continue to claim it until their dying end. Rather, Basayev’s death was a result of the “careless handling of explosives.” Not the type of valiant death a “shaheed” would hope for.

I also encourage readers to check out Thomas de Waal’s comment on Basayev in today’s Moscow Times. De Waal met with Basayev once in 1998, and while he claims that the terrorist was no “Islamist” or “politician”, he was a “permanent warrior” and “his fearlessness, cunning, propaganda skills and cruelty made him unique.” In Waal’s view, this makes Basayev irreplaceable. He continues:

Two of his kind do not come around twice in a generation. The bad news is that his removal came many years too late — and not just because many hundreds of people might otherwise be alive. The Russian leadership has eliminated or exiled the moderate wing of the Chechen pro-independence movement, which wanted to negotiate and could have brought alienated Chechens back intosome kind of political process.

Consider the situation of a young twenty-something Chechen male who has been part of the rebel movement for the last decade. He has seen friends and family members die and quite probably has been wounded or tortured by Russian security forces. He has almost no education. If he watches Russian television he will see reports of his comrades being “destroyed” as if they were vermin.

Now this man has no leaders left. What route does he follow? One route is collaboration. The so-called “Kadyrovtsy” who comprise Chechnya’s pro-Moscow security forces aremainly ex-fighters, taking a rest from the hills and earning a decent salary in a new uniform. Their loyalty is entirely provisional and on the day after their leader, Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, is replaced or arrested, there is no knowing what they will do next.

The other road is radical Islam. In the last five years, a network of shadowy jamaats, or Islamic groups, has sprung up across the North Caucasus, from Dagestan to Karachayevo-Cherkessia. Its adherents are anonymous pious young men from marginalized social groups. Not for them the theatrics of Basayev; they will operate like tiny ants gnawing away at the fundamentals of Russian power in the region.

This last point again raises the question of whether Basayev’s death will be a blessing that goes beyond the demise of a ruthless terrorist. Some, like Timur Aliev of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, are reporting how some in Chechnya hope that Basayev’s death will be the beginning of the conflict’s end. Others, like Andrei Smirnov at the Eurasia Daily Monitor, suggest that the militant’s death in no way means the problems in the North Caucauses are solved. Though the reigns of the rebels’ leadership now passes to Doku Umarov, the course he chooses for the movement could engender rivals to his leadership. Thus the movement could further fracture between a young and old guard. Another worry is that now rebel forces in Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, and Ingushetia lack leadership and an iconic hero. While many in Russia might greet the disarray of the Chechen nationalist movement, that chaos will only make any positives that might result from Basayev’s death difficult to achieve.

This difficulty will in part be exacerbated by the utter misanalysis Russia makes of the conflict. As Stephen Blank, another commentator at the Eurasia Daily Monitor, concludes:

Although official Russia likes to attribute the unrest in the Caucasus in general — and in Chechnya in particular — to Wahhabism, in fact the cause of the unrest remains long-standing Russian misrule and oppression. This situation ultimately led to unbridled Islamic terrorism as practiced by Basaev and his like-minded colleagues, but it is doubtful that Kadyrov and his thugs represent a better prospect or that anyone else has a solution to the problems of the North Caucasus. Undoubtedly Putin has won a big battle here, even if inadvertently, and cut down a tall tree of Chechen resistance. But it is unlikely that a people who have fought Russia for more than 200 years will simply accept defeat now or that Russia knows how and will bring about a peace based upon a legitimate order that compels assent rather than fear either in Chechnya or in the North Caucasus.

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According to current estimates there are 20 to 30 million Russians speaking peoples living outside of Russia.Before the collapse of the Soviet Union an estimated 30 million lived in CIS and Baltic nations.Currently the largest Russian community lives in Ukraine, with 8.3 million identifying themselves as Russian, while another 14.3 call Russian their mother tongue.Kazakhstan (4.1 million), Belarus (1.2 million) and Uzbekistan (1 million) are also CIS nations with large Russian populations.

The CIS is not the only place in the world Russians reside.There is an estimated 5 to 9 million living in countries outside the CIS.This number includes the some 12 million that left between 1917 and 1991 and their descendants.The largest communities exist in Germany (about 3 million), the United States (2.9 million) and Israel (1.2 million).Since 1991, 1.2 million Russians have migrated outside the CIS.

Given the numerical and geographical scope of the Russian speaking diaspora, how do Russians fair outside of Russia?Russians’ assimilation into the places where they immigrate has been a tough going. In states like Israel, which has been one of the main destinations for Russian Jews in the last decade, they find themselves excluded, if not despised. Sometimes this exclusion is self imposed.This has produced a variety of responses that are indicative of the global problems migration/immigration engenders.

Over the last 15 years, Russians have been on the move. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, estimates figure that 13 to 17 million have returned to Russia.This process is a good sign to the Kremlin, as it gives incentives to educated and skilled Russians to move back to their motherland, and more importantly settle in the skill starved regions.However, this task, as the Putin government is discovering, is not easy.Filling the regions in qualified and competent people has been a historical problem in Russia.In Soviet times transfer to the periphery was seen as informal exile.And given the dearth of qualified cadres in the center, party bosses were equally reluctant to send their best people.In fact, one can point to Khrushchev’s downfall as one example of bureaucratic resistance to living in the sticks.When Khrushchev proposed to send Gosplan bureaucrats to work closer to where production actually took place, it was Khrushchev who found himself out of a job.

Still, one cannot blame the Kremlin for not trying.It hopes to recruit 100,000 people next year.Incentives, like those being offered in Tver oblast, include benefits and jobs that pay 25,000 rubles a month.The Kremlin has dumped around 17 billion rubles into the program.Getting it to bear fruit will require the long haul and impatience is already making some declare it a failure.For example, Kaliningrad oblast was willing to accept 10,000 migrants, but only 596 applied for migration.

One problem is that CIS countries with large Russian communities, like Kazakhstan and Ukraine, recognize their value and are engaging in their own campaigns to discourage Russian technicians and engineers from leaving.One source reported to Kommersant, “Kazakhs got indignant and commissioned articles in the press with slogans like ‘We won’t let it happen!’ The same thing with Ukraine. Local officials made it clear to us that the outflow of Russians from Ukraine is undesirable. For instance, the Ukrainian East is not happy that we are encroaching on their tank specialists and employees of secret military machinery building plants.”

The social, political, and cultural impact of the Russian diasporas in these nations is readily felt and have required those states to consider them in their post-Soviet identity.The political strength of Russians in eastern Ukraine is well known. But in Kazakhstan, for example, as the political scientist/history Ronald Suny noted in an article in the December 2001 issue of Journal of Modern History, the creation of a post-Soviet Kazakh national identity had to consider the large Russian population.Radical Kazakh nationalists’ calls for making Kazakh the official language as well as rejecting all forms of Russification were negotiated with the real difficulties in alienating half the population.Thus, Kazakh national identity was more civic than ethnic, and therefore more inclusive than exclusive.

While many Russians are moving back to their homeland, many, especially Russian Jews, are opting to immigrate.The long history of anti-Semitism and the Soviet Union’s restrictions against immigration has prevented many from resettling in the Jewish state. This all changed when the Soviet Union collapsed, and many Russian Jews cited Israel’s “law of return” to immigrate.Russian Jews, who had suppressed their Jewish identity for so long, were suddenly “born again.”Others simply claimed Jewish lineage no matter how diluted it was.Still others piggybacked on Jewish spouses and stepparents.About 1 million Russian Jews have immigrated to Israel since 1991.Israel has a total population of around 7 million, making Russians a sizable portion, not to mention raising innumerable questions about cultural assimilation, politics, and the demographic character of the Israeli state.

The Russian diaspora is the subject of The Pilgrim Soul: Being a Russian in Israela new book by Tel Aviv University English Literature professor Ilana Gomel.Unfortunately, the book is written in Hebrew, and I must rely on a recent review by Yulia Lerner in Haaretz for its content.Hopefully the book will be translated into English or Russian.The book argues that the Russian Jewish experience in Israel is pretty much one where, to quote Marx, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains ofthe living.”Meaning, that how Russian Israelis weave themselves into Israeli society is very much a reflection of their particularly “dark history” in the Soviet/post- Soviet Union.Lerner writes,

This historic “past,” as we see from Gomel‘s book, bears down on the Russian Jews with special intensity. History never leaves them alone. It sits on their shoulders like a lead weight. But more than that, it decides everything for them – what they buy in the supermarket, how they pray, make love and dress, and, of course, how they vote. According to Gomel, Russia‘s dark history explains everything that the Russian immigrants do. It guides their thinking, their dietary habits and their fashion choices here in the new Middle East. Throughout the book, the author uses this history to explain all the “Russian peculiarities” in Israel: the prostitution phenomenon; attitudes toward the body and sex; interpersonal relationships and social behavior; love of math and science; Islamophobia; right-wing politics; a penchant for conspiracy theories; and finally an obsession with witch-hunts, a symptom of the Russian traitor syndrome. You come away with the impression that the Russians have some mysterious device for transmitting history from one generation to the next.

If Lerner’s evaluation of Gomel’s book is correct, such historical determinism leaves a bitter taste.Not only is such an analysis steeped in stereotypes and essentialism, it also forever relegates Russians to position of eternally outside Israeli society.It is no surprise that many Israelis already believe that Russian Jews’ Russianness has tainted their Jewishness beyond repair.

But such a book, however distasteful is foundational analytic might be, points to a much larger problem of how immigrant communities, even those who are the same “ethnicity” or “race” integrate into communities of cultural difference.There is enough historical evidence based on the American experience of Jews, Italians, and Irish to suggest that this process of assimilation occurs by means of a simultaneous shedding and rejection.As the Irish discovered in 19th century America, they had to embrace race for the sake of their ethnicity.This meant shedding much of their Irishness, while fully embracing ideology of whiteness that was predicated on racism toward blacks.As Hegel suggested, we discovery our identity through the recognition of the Other.

Israeli Russians are finding their Other in the form of the Arab, specifically the Palestinian.Russians are strong supporters of right wing parties.The head of Israel Beytenu, one of Israel’s far right political parties is Avigdor Liberman, who is himself a Russian immigrant. Currently, Liberman is second with 15% to Benjamin Netanyahu’s 27% to replace Ehud Olmert as Israeli Prime Minister.There is not doubt that as the right surges after the Lebanon War debacle, Russians will place a decisive electoral role.

But Russians’ political role in Israel goes beyond electoral politics.They are vital to the reproduction of Israel itself.In the 1990s, Russian immigration was seen by Israeli officials as a demographic bulwark to the Palestinians.They also served as replacement labor when Israel decided to purge Palestinian cheap labor from its work force.In addition, as many Russians occupy settlements that encroach on the West Bank, their survival becomes inevitably linked with the Palestinians further oppression.This “offshore Zionism” as Gadi Algazi describes the settlement of Modi‘in Illit, which is located three miles east of the Green Line, is a “colonization process [that] is

built not just on capitalist expansion but on social misery and poor people’s pressing needs, just as the separation wall is built on fears, real and imagined, amplified by daily propaganda. It draws in young couples from the slums of Jerusalem and enrolls new immigrants from the Russian Federation, who may find themselves sent to settle Ariel, for example, in the heart of the West Bank; large ultra-orthodox families too, gain access to subsidized housing only by joining the settlement project. All these can find themselves defending the occupation in order to defend the fragile social existence they have built for themselves under the guidance of government authorities, the settler movement and private capital.

Things however can go the opposite way, producing some of the most unlikely phenomena.Take the appearance of racist skinheads in Israel.In June, the Guardian UK and Haaretz reported that the Israeli government was looking into the website of one group called the White Israeli Union.The WIU is presumed to be run by Russian immigrants.But how do you explain Israeli skinheads?Especially when their website pictures a youth in an IDF uniform, saluting Hitler and calling for the killing of Arabs and Jews?It would seem to defy all logic.Or does it?

I think that the existence of Israeli skins is a testament for the fact that many Russian youths do feel outside Jewish society.After all, it is not uncommon for Russians to live in ghettos, and even though they may go into Israeli institutions like the school and the army and learn Hebrew, it doesn’t mean they are fully accepted as Israeli.Take for example, the conversation Lerner opens her review of The Pilgrim Soul with,

“Do you have Russian friends?” I asked [a colleague]. No, he replied. “Are there any Russians at the parties and gatherings you go to?” No, he replied. “Have you ever had a Russian girlfriend?” Again he said no. “But to tell you the truth,” he added, “when I meet a girl, it doesn’t matter how pretty she is. The minute I hear a Russian accent, her beauty diminishes by half.”

Part of the problem is, as Gumel’s book seems to suggest, Russians are viewed as Other in Israel, though a wholly different kind of Other than the Arab.Another problem is that Otherness is maintained by Russians themselves.So for youth who are outside Israeli society becoming a skinhead becomes the ultimate refusal of a society that also rejects you.

As Dick Hebdige argued in his seminal study Subculture: the Meaning of Style, refusal of the hegemonic culture is the function subcultures.Skinheads are no different in this regard even though their refusal is frequently coupled with violence. This is not to soften the very real anti-Semitism existing in the Jewish nation.Skinheads have already attacked Orthodox Jews and defaced synagogues and cemeteries.My point is to suggest that the problem runs much deeper than one having racist views; it is in part central to immigration itself.

There is no indication that Russian immigration/migration is going to end anytime soon.After all, there is nothing particularly Russian about it.As Mike Davis notes in his book, Planet of Slums, populations are on the move more than ever before and often it’s for reasons that defy the traditional push-pull factors many historians, sociologists, geographers and demographers have given.Rather he argues the “clash of civilizations” is not between East and West, Christianity and Islam.It is between the disenfranchised masses of immigrants/migrants who must eek out a new life among inhabitants who feel they are encroaching on their way of life and diluting, if not infecting, their culture, national identity, and well being.